Sermon Manuscript W ALKING IN THE L IGHT : E XPOSITORY S TUDIES IN F IRST J OHN “The Old/New Commandment” (1 John 2:7-11) • July 1, 2001 • Dr. Doug McIntosh, Sr. Pastor Introduction: The Marks of a Dark World The Bible is fond of describing the world we live in as a dark world—a world that has lost its way. The evidence of that isn’t very hard to come by even in our own country. Today the United States is the most dangerous place on the globe to conceive a child. One of every three children conceived today is destroyed while still in the womb. Of those children who see the light of day, about forty percent are raised by a single per- son—a mother not married to their father. Of the other sixty percent, about half will not reach adulthood with both parents in the home. At some point there will be a divorce. Only about thirty percent of the people who are conceived in the United States make it to adulthood while living in a home with both parents who are married to each other. We live in a dark society. The darkness is dominant when it comes to our ability to see what is right and wrong, too. Did you hear about the six-year-old last year in Canton, Ohio, who was “convicted” of sexual harassment? Yep, it really happened. This little boy really loved school, you see. He enjoyed learning, and he liked his teacher and his fellow students, and he really hated to miss school. Then one day in the spring semester he came down with a virus and he was coughing and had a low-grade fever. His mom had gotten a pe- diatrician’s appointment for him that morning; she knew she couldn’t send him to school like that. However, she knew he would be brokenhearted, so she decided to distract him. She let him sleep a little later in the morning, and timed it so he was in the bathtub at the moment that his school bus pulled up in front of the house. Just about the time that the PAGE 1bus was arriving, her phone rang. She went into the other room to answer it, and the little guy’s sister told him that the school bus was out front; so he jumped up, wearing nothing but his birthday suit, and ran into the living room with its big picture window. He stood there madly waving his arms, trying to get the bus driver to wait for him to get dressed so he wouldn’t miss school. So the school bus driver sees all this and goes directly to the principal’s office when she gets the kids to school and files a complaint of sexual harassment, presumably on behalf of those deeply offended first grade girls on the bus. The school hauled him in and told him that he was guilty of sexual harassment. They even made him sign a paper — this is a six-year-old, now — in which he admitted that he knew what he was doing was wrong. Then they suspended him from school for a week. All he was really guilty of was liking school too much. I suspect they may cure him of that pretty soon. That is merely symptomatic, of course. The stories could be multiplied by the dozen. Our world has lost its way. We walk in the darkness. But John the Apostle has a solution for that. In our passage for this morning, he talks about the way to bring some light into the world. Let’s look at what he says in 1 John 2:7-11. Scripture: 1 John 2:7-11 7 Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning. 8 Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining. 9 He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. 10 He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. 11 But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. Why The Old/New Commandment is So Critical What John does here is to tell us what will give us light in our darkness and credi- bility in the world and with each other. Now I think that is tremendously important in a dark world. How do you get anybody to pay attention today when there are so many competing voices, and many of them are so strident and hateful? How do you cut through the coldness and indifference of our age and gain a hearing for the good news of the gos- pel? John says that the way to do that is to go back to the commandment that the Lord Jesus gave His disciples on the night of His arrest. He sat at that Last Supper with them and said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35). John gives three reasons why this commandment to love each other is so critical. The first reason is... A. Because it’s old He plays on this “new commandment” idea in verse seven. He says that he is writing an old commandment, one that believers have had from the very beginning, going back to the Upper Room and the Last Supper. The commandment is old for two reasons. First... 1. It was given by Christ at the very beginning PAGE 2That, of course is the point John is making here. He isn’t inventing something new in the hopes of improving the way Christians are supposed to live and relate to each other. He is calling us back to that night when Jesus was recalling the Passover in that Upper Room, and filling that institution with new meaning. If you’ll think about the occasion, I think you’ll see why John is bringing us back to that time. Jesus is about to be crucified and formally rejected — not only by His own people, who should have recognized their Messiah when they saw Him — but by the Gentiles as well. After a short time of staying with the disciples after the resurrection, He is going to leave the world that rejected Him and be gone for a long time. During that time, the disciples will be responsible for starting the largest enterprise in the history of the globe. They will begin a movement that has by this time touched every nation on the face of the globe. What the disciples had to do must have seemed unbelievably huge at the time He spoke to them. And so it has turned out to be. The space race and all the wars that have ever been fought put together have not engaged the time, money, and energy that has been involved in the worldwide missionary effort. It is the largest human endeavor ever undertaken. So, you would think that he would give them the advice they needed to get this worldwide enterprise going — and He did. But his counsel is not what we might have expected. He doesn’t tell them everything to say; He doesn’t tell them what kind of plan- ning they will need to do. He doesn’t tell them how to pay for it all. He merely says, “Love one another.” He knows that if they just do that one thing they will get all the at- tention they need, because genuine love was then and is now a rare commodity. The old commandment was given by Christ at the very beginning. It’s foundational to everything Christians hope to do in this dark world. But there’s something else about its being old. In spite of its antiquity... 2. It never needs improvement Christian love is the stock in trade of the Christian believer in every realm. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to represent Jesus Christ at your workplace, or raise your family, or deal with a disagreeable neighbor. Loving others as Christ loves us is really what you need to do. It’s all you need to know. John says in verse seven that this old commandment is the message that every Christian learns right at the start of his Christian life: “The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning.” That word never needs improvement. We sometimes think that we would like to be in- volved in people’s lives and share the gospel with them, but we can’t because we don’t know how to say it well, or we are afraid that we won’t have answers to all their ques- tions. That ought not to concern anybody. You don’t have to have all the answers if you have credibility with people. And the one thing that gives credibility is when people feel that you love them. They will listen to what you have to say, or read a book, or talk to one of your friends — if they know that you love them. I heard a tape this week of an address by Richard John Neuhaus at an apologetics conference in Chicago. On it he was describing how Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say that a person who would seek to change another person has to meet two requirements. First, the one who wants to do the changing of the other—the one with the gospel—has to love the person without the gospel. I think most people probably would qualify on that count. PAGE 3But, secondly, he said, the one who is without the gospel has to be convinced that the person with the gospel loves him. And that is where we so often don’t qualify. We worry about communication and technique when we should be asking ourselves the question, “Does this person know that I love him?” Until that is true, probably not much will happen. So, in a dark world, we are called on to love people for three reasons. First of all, we are to love them because it’s an old commandment. Second, we are to love them... B. Because it’s new John is intentionally ringing the changes on this issue in verse eight when he writes, “Again, a new commandment I write to you.” Christ’s command to love one an- other is old, to be sure; but it is also new. Why does he put it that way? Why is the com- mand to love one another in one sense at least a new commandment? Because, for one thing... 1. It belongs to the character of the coming age That is, as he says in verse eight, “The darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.” That is, with each passing day we are one day nearer to the time when love will be the norm instead of the exception. The kingdom of God is coming, a kingdom run by one with scars on His hands and feet and on His side — scars that were put there by love. The people who nailed the nails weren’t loving, but if Jesus had not loved them, they would have been destroyed on the spot. Love put Him on the cross, love kept him there, and love will be the dominant theme throughout the age to come. When Jesus came to earth, that was the beginning of the shining of the light of the age to come. Now the light is off in the distance, but it’s definitely on the way. John wrote in the opening paragraph of his Gospel, “The true light that gives light to every man was com- ing into the world” (John 1:9). Now anything that is fundamentally characteristic of the kingdom of God and the age to come has to be new, doesn’t it? It’s like the advance guard of an army that hasn’t arrived yet. But the fact that it’s here at all tells us that the main body of the troops is on the way. There’s a second reason why love is a new commandment, too. It not only be- longs to the character of the coming age... 2. It has the timeless character of Christ Himself You see this in the statement in verse eight where John says that the new com- mandment is true in Him and in you. That is, love is the living manifestation of the truth. If you want people to believe you, love them. John says that when you do that, the credi- bility that you gain is the same credibility that was true of Jesus Christ. He showed us how to do it. Loving people is how we gain a hearing for the words of the gospel. Another way to say it is that love provides the music for the words of the gospel. Now most of us are fully aware that the gospel is wrapped up in words. God intended for it to be that way. You can hand somebody a Bible, and they can sit down and read it, and they can be brought to faith in Christ and have their names entered into the Book of Life. In other words, if you can bring the words of the gospel into an encounter with a human being, God can use that simple encounter to bring that person to Christ and eternal life. And if that was all there was to it, all that would be involved in the Christian cause would be seeing to it that Bibles could be found in every household in the world. PAGE 4But that’s not all there is to it. You can hand a man a book, but you can’t make him read it. So why would he read it? Because you asked him to. And why should that matter? Be- cause if he believes that you love him, he’ll do it because you asked him to. You see, that’s the music of the gospel. We need both. We need the words, and we need the music. If the music isn’t there, the words are just words. If the music is there, if a person feels loved, then the words are important. So the commandment to love one another is important for three reasons. First, be- cause it’s an old commandment; it’s part of the fundamental orders of our Commander in Chief. Second, because it’s also new. It’s part of something that will always be new and never go out of fashion. But there’s a third reason, too. The command to love one another is important... C. Because not obeying it has devastating results That’s what verses nine through eleven are about. Failure to love people is de- structive in two ways. First, it is destructive... 1. For the Christian disciple’s welfare Look at verse nine: “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.” Now you notice that there is talk here of hating one’s brother. Ha- tred is something that most of us don’t like to think we’re capable of, and as a result many people have read this text and decided that what you have here is a description of an unbeliever. Only unbelievers are in the darkness, we are told. Only unbelievers could possible hate a Christian brother. Or so the story goes. I wish that those assertions were true. I wish that all Chris- tians walked in the light of God’s truth, but they don’t. I wish that no Christians were ca- pable of hating a brother, but they are. And in fact there is one little word here that makes it quite plain that John has Christian disciples in mind in this verse, and that’s the little word his in verse nine: “The one who claims to be in the light but hates his brother...” John would never have used that word of a non-Christian hating a Christian. The fact is that in the sense John is talking about here, the Christian and the non-Christian are not brothers at all. “Brothers” is a word that is applied to people in the family of God. The only person who can hate his brother is a Christian. And it’s a mistake to attach some picture of violent and emotional antipathy onto this word hate. It isn’t necessary to want to take a sword and behead someone to hate them in the biblical sense. Indifference is quite enough. A cold, calculating indifference qualifies fully for that word hate. John is going to give us an example or two of this later, but I think you know what I mean. And, of course, Christians do get intensely angry with each other from time to time. Believers are fully capable of intense feelings of hatred if someone crosses them, or if they resent the success of another. John tells us what happens when we do that. He says that the one who hates his brother walks in the darkness. That doesn’t mean he has lost his standing with the Father, but it does mean that he has taken himself out of the light that God’s truth provides him. He is groping in the darkness. As far as God is concerned, when we thumb our noses at any command of his, we are walking around in the dark along with the world. Instead of supplying the light of the age to come for the darkness, we have lost it ourselves, even if temporarily. And the worst thing about that is that when you are walking in the darkness you don’t know if you will find your way back to the light again. As John says in verse 11, PAGE 5the Christian who hates his brother is walking in the dark and doesn’t know where he is going. In fact, he’s doing the very thing he was doing when he was converted. He’s just bringing that dark, unconverted behavior into his Christian life. That’s why John says in verse nine, “The one who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the dark until now.” He is living the life of the world at large. He’s violating the warning of the Apostle Paul about being conformed to this world (Romans 12:1-2). Did you know that a large percentage of the Christians in the world today don’t know where they’re going? They don’t have a clue. They are driven by their own im- pulses instead of by the light of God’s truth. Is it any wonder that stumbling around aim- lessly is the common result of all that? They don’t need, however, to be educated. That’s not what keeps them in the dark. That’s not their problem. You and I know people like this. Some of them are in our families. Some of them are in our neighborhoods. Some of them are our good friends. And they don’t need training. They need to give up their resentments and their grudges and their hatreds, and their expressions of indifference. And until they do, they will continue to stumble in the dark and be a liability to the cause of Christ. And all that raises the other devastating result. Failing to love others not only puts us in the darkness, it darkens our world as well. 2. For the Christian disciple’s world Christians are God’s light shining in the darkness. As John says in verse ten, “He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him” (1 John 2:10). Right now the significant problems of our world are really not problems that are caused so much by the pagans who live around us as they are caused by the failure of disciples to shine the light of Christ into the world we live in. Until the world sees what real love is, they don’t have any hope. The best they can do is to simply try to get along the best they can. Once in a while you see a significant glimmer of the light. Twelve years ago, in the days immediately following the fall of the Berlin wall, in what was then still East Germany, Christians in that area did some abiding in the light. The dictator of East Ger- many for years had been a man named Erich Honecker. Shortly before the wall fell, he had been admitted to a Berlin hospital to undergo treatment for cancer. He had been a typical communist dictator, riding roughshod over the people, and making sure that everybody knew that human dignity was a myth. People were just cattle, only valuable because of what they could do for the state. He and his wife were the most hated people in East Germany. Now he had been stripped of all his offices and privileges. Even the Communist party had booted him out. He was an old man with cancer, coming out of the hospital, and his landlord, the guy who owned the palatial villa he and his wife had been using, booted him out into the street. The new government refused to provide him and his wife with a place to stay. They were literally standing on the street. One German pastor was asked by a church leader if he would be willing to take in the Honeckers. Pastor Holmer and his family ran a shelter for homeless people. They de- cided that they couldn’t give away a room in the shelter for the Honeckers, so they took them into their own home. What made this particularly meaningful was the educational policy of the Honecker regime. Pastor Holmer and his wife had ten children, and eight of them had applied for college in East Germany. They all had either very good or excellent PAGE 6grades, but they were all turned down because they were Christians. Honecker’s wife, Margot, had run the East German education system for 26 years, and she made sure that Christians were excluded from higher education. Now she was living in a home that had been so badly injured by her own policies. A lot of people were shocked that the Holmers would do this. They were chal- lenged to explain how they could take in this hated individual. Even Christians criticized them. Pastor Holmer just said, “We’re doing it because we know it’s what the Lord wants us to do. He challenged us to follow Him and to take in all who are weary and heavy laden. We have no bitterness in our hearts. As we follow the Lord, he makes us able to truly forgive.” That’s shining God’s light in a dark place. I don’t know what happened to the Honeckers. I do know that if there was anybody in all of East Germany who could bring them the good news of Christ in a way that they would take seriously, it was this pastor’s family. Our world doesn’t have any notion of morals or truth or wisdom or propriety. But we are in no position to be smug about all that, because if it doesn’t, at least part of the reason it doesn’t is because we haven’t been shining God’s light very clearly into it. God knows better than we do. He knows that if the music is right, the words are really pretty easy to come by, and they are believable because of the music. The old/new commandment is a summary of all that Christian living is. It is criti- cal because it’s old. It comes from the Lord Himself. It’s critical because it’s new; it re- flects the dawning of the age to come. And it’s critical because of what happens when it’s ignored or minimized. The consequences are enormous. God grant that we may curse the darkness less and shine the light of the old/new commandment instead. C OPYRIGHT © 2001 P. D OUGLAS M C I NTOSH . 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